Figure: Good Example - Are your graphs simple to understand?

Figure: Bad Example - When there's more than four preceptual units, a graph becomes hard to digest

Figure: Good Example - You can split your graphs to make them easer to understand

Pie graphs are used to show the general composition of an element. It's good for seeing at a glance what section is dominating, but it doesn't handle details very well.

Figure: Bad Example - This Pie Graph is too complicated and difficult to understand.

Figure: Good Example - This Pie Graph has been simplified and it is easy to see at a glance that Nike sold the most sneakers this month compared to others.

Figure: Good Example - This Bar Graph data hasn't even been processed but it's still readable.

Figure: Operating System's Regional Settings

Figure: Bad Example - Two screens with inconsistent date formats

Figure: Good Example - Two screens with consistent date formats

The best way to do this in your code is to grab the culture information from the application thread and use it to automatically format your Datetime data type. Do not use hard coded datetime formatting strings unless it's absolutely necessary.

startTimeTextBox.Text = resultResults.StartTime.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm:ss");
                    

Figure: Bad Example - using hard coded formatting string

'VB.NET
'Initial CultureInfo settings for the application
Public initialCulture As CultureInfo
...
...
txtDateCreate.Text = CType(txtDateCreate.Tag, System.DateTime).ToString(initialCulture.DateTimeFormat)
                    

Figure: Good Example - Using culture info to format datetime

Figure: Bad Example - Three screens with inconsistent time formats

Figure: Good Example - Three screens with consistent formats

​

Users are familiar with the Outlook calendar control. When the calendar control is used it should incorporate all of these features of the Outlook calendar control.

Figure: Bad Example - Calendar Control - Sunday is at the front, today's date is not highlighted, and items with data are not bolded

Figure: Good Example - Calendar Control - Monday is at the front, today's date is highlighted, and items with data are bolded

1. ​​Date and Time Printed and User who printed it - see warning below (e.g. Printed by SSW2000\JatinValabjee on 3/1/2006 3:16:30 PM)
   
2. Execution Time (e.g. Execution time: 1 minute, 10 seconds)
   
3. Page x of y (e.g. Page 3 of 10)
   
4. Link to company website + slogan  (e.g. www.ssw.com.au - Writing software people understand)
   

 

Use these handy report expressions to show the above information.

NOTE: Do not use System.DateTime.Now​ for your Execution Time because if you do it will return the result at time of printing the document/PDF.  Instead store the value in a variable (for example GroupExecutionTime) and then call that.

Warning: Adding the User who printed it stops all data-driven subscriptions
When you try to add the User your data-driven subscriptions will fail with the following error:
'The '/GroupHealth' report has user profile dependencies and cannot be run unattended. (rsHasUserProfileDependencies)'.
A quick workaround is to add a user function to fallback the error to a nice message, like: "SYSTEM",

Try

Return Report.User!UserID

Catch

Return "System"

End Try

Use above function to replace your reference to Report.User!UserID will allow the subscription to work correctly.

More Options for Reporting